The Evolution Of Content Management

Published in

Globant

8 min readMar 30, 2023

Delivering optimal digital experiences is becoming imperative. Today’s customers expect consistent, unified experiences at every touch point. If companies don’t put their customers first today, they will lose their relevance and revenue.

So what is the solution? Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) are software solutions that help improve customer experiences.

So… What is a DXP?

Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) as an integrated software framework for engaging a wide range of audiences through a wide range of digital touchpoints.

Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy, and continually improve websites, portals, mobile apps, and other digital experiences.

While it’s impossible to cover in just a couple of sentences everything a customer might need for their digital experience, the two core principles highlighted in this definition are:

Multiple integrated technologies are needed to control a wide range of touchpoints.
There is a need for a central platform to be the control center for this expanded experience.

With any technology, whether existing or new, standardization of details takes time and there is a natural selection of all the features that end up sticking around.

The difference between CMS, WEM, and DXP

Since its inception, the principles and technologies behind DXP have evolved with the demands of the digital consumer and digital worker, but in essence, it boils down to three stages:

CMS: The introduction of CMS helped companies gain control and introduced new challenges by creating silos in the organization.
WEM: Provided centralization and consistency to the channel, providing better content management. Based on experience, it is known that a WEM ecosystem can be complex and limit, even block, the ability of development teams to maintain it.
DXP: A DXP combines the power of WEM with the benefits of a radically open platform, leveraging the power of microservices architecture and APIs to reduce ecosystem complexity.

Content Management System (CMS)

Content management systems are the primary platform that helps businesses organize written content, images, data, and other structures or settings needed for their online presence.

A CMS or WCM (Web Content Manager) provides version management and builds workflows to maintain consistency across large, global sites.

Web Experience Management (WEM)

As digital became an important facet of brands, new channels emerged that allowed better interaction with customers and collaboration between the different areas of a company. This is why the CMS had to evolve to allow the exchange of digital information, then WEM emerged.

These systems introduced rule-based personalization of online experience and provided the ability to collect different user behaviors, define personas, and create and deliver unique content to the target audience.

Most importantly, WEMs allow companies to share content, data, logic, and other elements across channels in a consistent manner.

Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

The experience quickly moved beyond content, and now e-commerce companies want to share any type of asset or group of assets through any digital touchpoint online, in-store, in banners, at kiosks, via their own portals, suppliers, and customers, that is, through the most varied types of systems… HELP!!!

It is clear that the digital experience is no longer just a way to let people know about us, but it is essential to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty after the acquisition.

The digital journey has expanded, and different parts of a company, suppliers, and customers are using more back-end applications to handle their part of that journey. For the visitor experience to remain consistent from acquisition to promotion, these back-end systems must be integrated.

Digital is no longer just in the hands of the marketing team; the entire business and all areas of the company are responsible in a certain way.

All these aforementioned systems (CMS, WEM, and DXP) continue to seek the same thing, to make the interaction between the client and the brand satisfy the needs of both parties, but the way they allow it has evolved.

The advantages of a DXP

As we defined above, having all the tools we use to control our digital experience come from one company, all in one big suite, is simply not practical.

Every part of our business or client should be free to innovate, add or replace solutions, and connect data with minimal disruption to the overall experience. Most organizations investing in technology today do so with tools they truly enjoy working with.

Control every touchpoint

The number of interaction points you need to manage is growing rapidly. Not only do you have to be able to move to each touchpoint as quickly as customers expect, but you have to keep everything consistent in content, feel, and logic.

This is where API-based design shines. The APIs deliver the raw information in a predefined way, and each touchpoint can present that raw information in its own structures and configurations.

This means that we will write our content once and it can be used on the web, mobile, customer portals, kiosks, chatbots, voice assistants, and any other digital touchpoint you choose. When we update this content, it will be updated everywhere automatically.

API exchange is not limited to simple content and data but can provide complex elements such as services, simulators, etc.

Connect the business

We know that a DXP is not the only tool that our client requires. You’ll need a marketing platform to attract customers, a commerce platform to handle inventory and transactions, a supportive environment to work with existing customers, and the freedom to choose other point solutions that fit your unique needs.

DXP sits at the core of all of the aforementioned platforms and tools, using APIs to aggregate and orchestrate data to determine and show visitors and customers the right experience at all times.

In a DXP we can integrate all the tools that are defined that impact the experience of visitors, customers, and other types of users, with minimal interruption due to maintenance or failure of any of them. And if an area of our client has a preferred tool, it simply connects to the DXP via the API adding tools with ease.

A flexible architecture

For the above connections to work, the structure of the DXP must be flexible. In order to achieve this flexibility, we resort to a microservices architecture. Using this architecture, back-end logic is decoupled from front-end presentation, so developers and marketers can make changes quickly and independently of each other.

It also means that improvements to the platform can be made in a modular way, deploying the changes to a particular part without affecting other parts of the platform. This is especially important when building and implementing custom components or integrations with other top-tier systems.

This type of platform is commonly used under the concept of “content as a service” (commonly known as headless) to store and distribute content in a structured API, and it can also be used as “experience as a service” allowing us to edit styles and display complete elements to users in the front-end applications.

Top 5 Digital Experience Platforms to watch out for in 2023

Here is a list of five popular digital experience platforms we can start implementing to enhance your website performance and deliver a seamless experience.

Acquia

An open-source digital experience platform Acquia, having pre-defined monitoring and performance tools, helps non-coders build engaging and customer-centric websites faster.

The Acquia platform helps you develop and deploy robust and scalable websites, and apps. Acquia helps larger teams manage content across all platforms to enhance seamless digital experience delivery.

Acquia platform facilitates its users with Acquia Cloud, Acquia Cloud Site Factory, Acquia Lightning, Acquia DAM, Acquia Lift, and Acquia Commerce.

Acquia dev desktop helps you quickly publish, develop and synchronize your Drupal-based websites on the web.

Here are the top features of Acquia:

User-friendly and scalable tools to build powerful Drupal applications;
multilingual and localization support;
structured content;
automated deployment;
enterprise workflows.

Adobe

Adobe is a digital experience platform with an open and flexible architecture that provides personalized, content-rich DX experiences with digital asset management and a content management system.

With its smart tools and services, you can quickly build custom web applications that fit your business requirements perfectly.

As a DX platform, Adobe offers forms and communication processes, and web content management and easily handles high traffic with cloud and security. This platform provides automation and monitoring in your digital experience strategy.

Most Adobe products are feature-rich. The Adobe tool handles component building blocks and the flexible workflow integration smoothly. It is truly one of the best digital experience platforms for big enterprises.

Adobe Sensei is one of the Adobe products based on Artificial Intelligence that helps you with data-centric decisions and customized customer experiences.

Here are the top features of Adobe:

It has a flexible cloud infrastructure;
asset management at its best;
mature AI data models.

Drupal

The Drupal platform facilitates businesses to manage unique content across channels and deliver personalized experiences to connect with their targeted audience.

Drupal strives to meet the emerging demands for personalized content. From engaging customers to lead generation and measuring revenues, you can do it all with the Drupal platform.

Moreover, it allows marketers and entrepreneurs to manage websites easily, multi-channel digital experiences, and shopping experiences, and integrate a diverse digital marketing ecosystem.

Here are the top features of Drupal:

No third-party dependency anymore;
workflow and content moderation;
great multilingual support;
removed Panelizer and replaced with Layout Builder;
headless CMS;
fast content publishing, email marketing, digital analytics, automation.

Liferay

Liferay Digital experience platform (DXP) is designed to take over future technology trends like microservices, digital experience management, and quicker build management.

Liferay is designed to enable digital transformation and facilitates the feature-packed companies’ ability to handle challenges around cloud technology, digital tools, and customer experience initiatives.

With Liferay, businesses can easily and quickly address critical business challenges.

The Liferay platform helps you with fast business process automation, multi-channel support, personalized data, and collaborative development. It facilitates users with customized workflows and sign-in features.

Moreover, it enables you to improve customer experiences and increase operational efficiency by adopting a self-service portal to streamline user, partner, and customer processes.

Here are the top features of Liferay:

Clustering and Performance monitoring;
high availability and scalability;
auditing and optimization;
multitenancy.

Salesforce

The Salesforce DXP is built on Customer 360. It helps companies deliver faster digital experiences across all channels. It ultimately accelerates your business growth while engaging more customers with data-driven sites, portals, and mobile applications.

Salesforce transforms personalized, consistent digital customer experience into a reality. It provides you with a seamless, fast, effective digital customer experience.

The Salesforce digital experience platform helps users with customer-centric development, building stronger relationships, creating personalized content, improving branding, increasing engagement, and scaling whenever you need it with an evolving ecosystem of AI and integrations.

Salesforce customer 360 solutions reinvent the customer experience using data-driven sites, portals, and applications.

The Salesforce platform takes massive amounts of available customer data and turns them into intelligent, actionable solutions for a unique digital customer experience.

The platform is best known for its scalable architecture, power-packed features, and rich functionality.

Here are the top features of Salesforce:

Branding and customization;
personalization;
scalability and flexibility.

Summary

Choosing a type of platform can be overwhelming… It requires taking a critical look at where our digital experience is today and, more importantly, determining what level of performance you want in the long term (3–5 years). Ultimately, choosing between a CMS, a WEM system, and a DXP involves deciding which type of system will best fit your needs at the right level.